SGI Delivers Shared Memory System for Earth Simulator

One of the compute blades for the SGI UV 2000 (Photo: SGI)

SGI announced that the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has selected a SGI UV 2000 with Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v2 series for per and post-processing offline grid simulations for its Earth Simulator supercomputer. Working with NEC, the new supercomputer combines Intel's latest high performance processors with SGI's scalable open shared memory platform. The supercomputer broke the previous SGI record for SPEC OMP2012, recording a 13.6 percent improvement with SPECompG_base2012 of 61.9.

"SGI UV 2000 powered by Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v2 series propels us to the next level of large scale, fine-grained simulations that were otherwise unthinkable due to memory constraints," said Dr. Toshiyuki Asano, group leader, Simulation Technology Application Research Group, Earth Simulation Center of JAMSTEC. "Furthermore, due to the significant and specialized capability of the supercomputer, we expect to see a substantial increase in industrial use through our strategic partnership initiatives. Through the Strategic Program of Earth Simulator for advancement of industrial use, we are already seeing research projects needing entire memory capacity of UV 2000."

The newly installed supercomputer is one of the largest shared memory systems powered by 2,560 cores of Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v2 series and provides 49.152 Tflops of computing capacity with 32TB shared memory for a Single System Instance. Along with UV 2000, SGI UV 20 powered by 40 cores of Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v2 series enables visualization of the simulation results and SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 provides RAID storage solution with 240TB capacity under a Network File System (NFS) environment.

The SGI solution provides JAMSTEC with super fine-grained simulation results and dramatically increases compute efficiency. The solution will accelerate a number of research projects involving earth sciences, especially those related to global warming projections. In addition, the solution will be widely utilized by automotive manufacturers and both the pharmaceutical and chemical industries through a 'Strategic Use Acceleration Program of Earth Simulator,' a program designed to increase industrial usage through strategic partnerships.

"Innovative and scalable solutions like SGI UV 2000 help scientists, academics, and industries to gain greater insight to their data-driven computing problems through the increased memory capacity provided by the Intel Xeon E5-4600 v2 processor in 4 socket configurations," said Charles Wuischpard, vice president Technical Computing Group at Intel Corporation. "The new Intel Xeon E5-4600 v2 processor also helps these systems meet the needs of demanding workloads with up to 50% more performance, while conserving power with 45% greater energy efficiency when compared to previous generation products."